Last of the Mohicans

...Pelham Grenville Wodehouse (or "Plum" from his Reviewed by Brandon Crocker own unsuccessful childhood attempts at pronouncing "Pelham") was born in 1881 to a mid-ranking British colonial official and his well-bred wife...

...The Unloved One G. WODEHOUSE is to the comic novel what Franz Joseph Haydn is to the symphony...

...When, in 1989, Solidarity scored an overwhelming triumph over the Communists in democratic elections, it triggered a chain reaction that within months brought down the entire apparatus of Communist oppression in Eastern Europe...

...Like many well-read and Joseph Shattan is the author of Architects of Victory: Six Heroes of the Cold War...

...In practice, its heaviest guns were aimed at Communist dictatorships, which ruthlessly exploited their workers while claiming to rule in their name...

...Wodehouse, who wrote 90 novels and short story collections and contributed to 33 musical comedies, usually as a lyricist, was, arguably, the greatest comic writer of the 20th century...

...As Puddington writes: [Kirkland] used the influence of his position, his powers of persuasion, his clout in international cirMAY 2005 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 59 BOOKS N REVIEW Iles, and the organizational capabilities of the AFL-CIO to promote Solidarity, defend its activists, and punish those who vowed to destroy it...

...There was clearly an element of self-interest in Kirkland's international-ism: Once they belonged to free trade unions, foreign workers would be empowered to demand higher wages, which would make American products more competitive, and American jobs more secure...

...He knew that free trade unions could not exist unless governments permitted workers to speak freely, to associate freely, and to organize strikes freely—and he was convinced that such governments were far less likely to behave aggressively than governments which outlawed free trade unions...

...In 1940, when he was 18, he shipped out to sea, and in 1942 he enrolled in what would become the Merchant Marine Academy...

...After the war, Kirkland and his young family moved to Washington, where he enrolled in Georgetown University, apparently with the intention of joining the Foreign Service...

...But it was never simply a matter of self-interest for Kirkland...

...Although Kirkland did not join labor out of ideological commitment," writes Puddington, "he regarded service in labor as a calling, and not simply a job...

...It was also true that Reagan had been a dedicated union man, had even served as president of the Screen Actors Guild, but there is no one a True Believer despises more than an apostate, and in Kirkland's eyes Ronald Reagan—the trade union leader who had gone over to the Dark Side—was an arch-apostate...

...and in 1979 he succeeded Meany as the federation's president...

...Kirkland's disdain for liberals of the Arthur Schlesinger/John Kenneth Galbraith variety, his many conservative friends (including journalists George Will and William Safire), and his acerbic wit (when his dachshund, Stanley, rolled over on its back, Kirkland would say that his dog has assumed "the full State Department position") might suggest that, at heart, he was a conservative...

...in 1969 he was elected to the federation's number two position, its secretary-treasurer...

...His eventual successor, John Sweeney, promised to restore the AFL-CIO's fortunes by "repositioning" it as a militantly left-wing institution...

...This was true in Nicaragua, where Kirkland proved a tough and resourceful opponent of the Sandinistas...

...Kirkland was very much a man of Washington," writes Puddington, and the New Dealer's faith in Washington's duty and ability to solve America's social and economic problems was as central to Kirkland's self-image as his anti-Communist fervor...

...He liked to denounce Big Business as the "soft underbelly of freedom," and he gleefully contrasted Corporate America's alleged willingness to "put profits before human freedom" with the AFL-CIO's principled support for workers' B O O K S I N R E V I E W rights...

...I don't think so...

...In his astute and sympathetic biography of Lane Kirkland, long-time AFL-CIO watcher Arch Puddington reminds us of what the American labor movement was like before the rot set in by recounting the life and times of one of the movement's most out-standing figures...

...The Wodehouse children were raised in boarding schools and by aunts, uncles, and other relatives in England...

...NORTON, 530 PAGES, $2795...

...And as good as Haydn might be, could he have described, in music, a worried soul as looking like "a pterodactyl with a secret sorrow...

...Joseph Lane Kirkland was a son of the South...

...Fortunately, he failed...

...The difference being that of Haydn's 107 symphonies, as even a Haydn backer will admit, few, if any, are real corkers...

...But by the time of Kirkland's death in 1999, the older tribal members had long since given up the ghost, while the younger ones had gone on to make careers for themselves in the Republican Party, where they were known as neoconservatives...

...Yet even as he denounced Reagan's domestic policies (under Reagan, Kirkland charged, "schoolteachers are vilified," "laws are selectively enforced," and "derelicts and bag ladies huddle" in doorways and "expire in alleys"), he supported Reagan's anti-Communist initiatives abroad...

...For Kirkland, promoting free trade unions abroad was a way of fostering world peace...

...In 1947, the AFL published a map of the Soviet Gulag—a fact Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn pointedly recalled when he addressed the AFL-CIO in 1975 (and, incidentally, stayed in the Kirklands' Washington home...

...In his final years of life, Kirkland was an increasingly isolated figure—a modern-day version, as it were, of the Last of the Mohicans...

...He also married during the war and joined a union—Local 88 of the Masters, Mates and Pilots Association...

...Half a century earlier, his tribe (variously known as the Right-Wing Social Democrats, the Liberal Internationalists, and the Cold War Liberals) had produced many of the Great Men of the Land...

...To many of them, Kirkland's record was fairly dismal: He had failed to stop Reagan, failed to defeat Bush, failed to derail NAFTA, and, most unforgivably, failed to stem the AFL-CIO's membership decline...

...Ronald Reagan—launched his bid for the presidency, Kirkland reacted with intense and passionate hostility...

...Once the proud flagship of America's Cold War liberal establishment, today the labor federation is a tottering hulk largely manned by aging leftists...

...To Kirkland, this proved that whereas Big Business was nothing more than a self-seeking special interest group, Big Labor was the party of humanity, or as he liked to say, "the people's lobby...

...McCrum, an author of several works of fiction and literary editor of the Observer, instead plays at psychoanalyst...

...His ancestors included planters, judges, and other members of the Confederate elite, but Kirkland's father was a failed cotton-broker, and he grew up in modest circumstances in a South Carolina mill town...

...Anti-Washington—a.k.a...

...But as Puddington makes abundantly clear, nothing could be further from the truth...

...soured on the war, and on anti-Communism in general, labor leaders hardly bothered to hide their contempt...

...It was true that Reagan, like Kirkland, was an outspoken anti-Communist and a sharp critic of detente—but Kirkland undoubtedly convinced himself that Republican corporate circles would soon bring the affable actor into line...

...I T SHOULD NOT COME AS A SURPRISE, then, that when Mr...

...Though Wodehouse always described his child-hood as enjoyable, McCrum confidently states that Wodehouse was "in denial...

...That certainly is the fate that has befall-en the AFL-CIO...

...58 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 Lane Kirkland: Champion of American Labor by Arch Puddington (JOHN WILEY & SONS, 342 PAGES, $30) Reviewed by Joseph Shattan highly intelligent individuals, he started out as a speechwriter, but he soon gained a reputation as an authority on pensions, foreign policy, and electoral politics, In 1960 he became executive assistant to the AFL-CIO's first president, George Meany...

...Because of the imperial duties of their father in Hong Kong, Plum and his two brothers (a third would come later) rarely saw their parents—Plum for about a total of six months between the ages of three and 15...

...and that he bore great scars from his neglected childhood...

...McCrum even argues that abandonment by his mother left Wodehouse with a distrust of women bordering on misogyny, as evidenced by a few unflattering },r<'micn Crocker is a real estate executive and writer living in San Diego, Wodehouse: A Life by Robert McCrum (W.W...

...Puddington cites an especially revealing conversation between Meany, Kirkland, and the great Soviet dissident, Vladimir Bukovsky: The subject was the appointment by President Carter of Paul Warnke as America's chief arms control negotiator...

...It is a rather pedestrian observation that the paucity of parents and an overabundance of aunts in Wodehouse's works have a connection with his upbringing, and McCrum is not satisfied to leave it at that...

...It brought him the Medal of Freedom from President Clinton, and glowing tributes from Poland's Lech Walesa, Germany's Helmut Schmidt, and a host of foreign policy notables—from everyone, in fact, except those who counted most: the AFL-CIO's labor barons who sat on its executive council and held Kirkland's fate in their hands...

...and above all, it was true in Poland, where Kirkland's early and unrelenting support for the democratic trade union movement known as Solidarity was critically important...

...In 1995, these critics forced Kirkland to surrender his presidency...

...During World War II, Kirkland served aboard ships that were present in every theater of combat...

...The American trade union movement had a long and honorable history of anti-Communist militancy...

...Thus far, Sweeney has kept only half his promise: He has indeed "repositioned" labor, but its fortunes continue to decline...

...Through- In theory, the AFL-CIO was out America's Vietnam agony, the AFL-CIO was a steadfast supporter of efforts to save equally opposed to dictatorships South Vietnam from Communist conquest and when so many of labor's liberal allies of the right and left...

...After World War II, labor representatives such as Irving Brown and Jay Lovestone helped defeat Communist attempts to dominate French and Italian trade unions...

...Bukovsky responded that some-one holding to such a position "must either be a madman or a Soviet agent," to which Kirkland replied, "He's something in-between the two: an American liberal...

...In fact, McCrum writes, Wodehouse created his distinctive literary world as an emotional "defense mechanism" to shield him from unpleasant realities...

...Now Robert McCrum provides us with what his publishers call the "definitive" biography of "the Master...

...it was true in El Salvador, where Kirkland's support helped Jose Napoleon Duarte become that war-torn country's democratically elected president...

...Moreover, solidarity with his "brothers and sisters" in the international labor movement was vital to Kirkland's self-image...

...B O O K S I N R E V I E W Last of the Mohicans T SEEMS TO BE AN IRON LAW OF POLITICS that organizations that do not start out on the right invariably end upon the left...

...When it came to domestic issues, Kirkland was a conventional New Deal liberal—someone who favored alarge and growing welfare state, and who regarded the free market and its champions with deep distrust...

...In 1948, however, he became a member of the research staff of the American Federation of Labor (which merged with the Congress of Industrial Organizations in 1955) and embarked on a career in the labor movement that would last 47 years...

...In theory, the AFL-CIO was equally opposed to dictatorships of the right and left...

...He pressed the cause of Polish workers in Congress, kept the heat on three presidential administrations, enlisted the aid of labor movements from other countries, and coordinated a wide-ranging program of material assistance that supported beleaguered union activists and enabled Solidarity to maintain an underground press that amounted to hundreds of newspapers and bulletins...

...Kirkland's role in securing Poland's independence was undoubtedly his finest achievement...

...Central to his sense of calling was Kirkland's belief that the AFL-CIO was obliged to support the growth of free trade unions around the world...

...Kirkland's rise within the movement, though not meteoric, was impressive...

...Thus it came about that when the American political system finally produced a presidential candidate who could destroy the Evil Empire, Lane Kirkland did everything he could to defeat him...

...But if the labor movement he had led was in disarray, and the political tribe he belonged to was virtually extinct, at least the old warrior had the satisfaction of knowing, before finally biting the dust himself, that 60 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MAY 2005 the Soviet Union had preceded him to the grave, and that he had contributed mightily to its demise...

...When Bukovsky indicated unfamiliarity with the name, Meany explained that Warnke was a disarmament enthusiast who might even favor unilateral arms reductions in the face of a Soviet buildup...